Tech at the speed of Warp

Labels: Design, GUI, Programing, Visualisation

Labels: Design, Programing, Visualisation

A collaboration between Microsoft and University of Washington produced a interesting concept of how a photo collection could be explored in 3D. This is one amazing piece of programing achievement.
Now, lets just hope it will make it to the mainstream sooner rather than latter.

Labels: Design, Programing, Visualisation

In the age of Wikis, Google Earth/Mars and after WikiMapia it was just a mater of time before someone creates a Wikimapia styled web service for the heavens. It is surprising that we had to wait so log to get such web application.
WikiSky has a database of more than half a billion (500,000,000) stellar objects. Thats one impressive database. One additional feature next to the shear size of the database is the SDSS mode. WikiSky uses Sloan Digital Sky Survey images to display real photographs of the sky you are looking at through WikiSky.
A couple of comments; search could be better, lists of available high-res images for selected object should show in tooltip on main map and not on separate page that is hard to navigate.

They are looking for people who are willing to code and improve their service, also they are publishing their API so all you MashUp junkies, start coding.

Labels: GUI, Programing, Space, Visualisation

The good old days. Days when even programing complex things meant you only needed to know one or perhaps two programing languages. When 64kb of memory was sufficient to produce games that are even now played with joy. There are many Commodore 64 emulator software out there but all of them are, lets say, not that user friendly.
Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers created an interesting Flash and Action Script implementation of C64 emulation. Once you load the page with the emulator it automatically loads the start message we all know and love from C64 and strait on we can play games or program the legendary machine.
Emulation is still not complete and a list of things has to be added but I love it. It would also be nice if you could save the program you made or upload your own games, stretch the emulation to full screen and etc.

Labels: GUI, Open Source, Programing

There is always a need to reduce work and programing is no exception. Alot of times there is some algorithm or function that are simply to dirty to code, I call it "manual labor". Under "Manual Labor" I take any programing problem where solution is known but to get to that point we need to spend hours of coding.
With Introduction of Krugle and Google Code Search this task has become alot easier.

Krugle is a search engine designed for searching large stacks of source code for variety of programing languages.
Demo of Krugle capabilities can be seen here.

Labels: Open Source, Programing

Past week I had a really big problem. There was a document that I needed to make each and every day.

The problem consisted of having one unsorted sheet with diverse data and as it is not constant, on one day a piece of data would be in row 113 and the next it would be in row 65, it would be simply a mammoth mask to undertake each day in organizing the data to fit the table.

The picture on the left is a sample of one such table. Code column is scrambled and you have to unscramble it every day. Now imagine that there are more than 100 or 1000 such entries.

First we need to create on another sheet (in this case it will be Sheet1 and unsorted table on Sheet2) a layout of how we want our report to look like. On the right is yet again a sample of how it could look. Note that the code Column is sorted. This is our reference for extracting data from the table. It could contain any form of data (text, date etc). There is no specific need for code column to be the reference one, it could have easily been the Value or Name column.

Now comes the "Hard" part. In columns that we wish to populate we need to enter this formula:

=INDEX(Sheet2!B:B,MATCH(A3,Sheet2!A:A,0))

There are two functions in this formula. First is INDEX and the second is MATCH.

INDEX(Sheet2!B:B,MATCH(A3,Sheet2!A:A,0))

• Sheet2 is from where we will take the data
  
• B:B identifies the column from which the data will be taken
  
• MATCH(A3,Sheet2!A:A,0))
  
  • A3 is that we are looking for and in our case it is the Code (product code, etc.)
    
  • Sheet2 is where we will conduct our search
    
  • and A:A is the range in which we will search. A:A means the entire column A.
    
  • 0 is a Match Type argument number and for more information on it type MATCH in Excel Search bar. With this set to 0 there is also a possibility of doing searches with wildcards like * or ?. Where * is any length or letters sequence sequence and ? stands for just one letters character. This does not work with numbers.
    
  • All of this together searches entire column A in Sheet2 for value in A3 on Sheet1 and returns the row in which that data was found.

INDEX takes information about the row number that is provided by MATCH and completes the formula so that we get the data from the row we want and from column B on Sheet2.
After entering the formula we can copy it to others and we have our self a report that stays the same regardless of how our data change. The only prerequisite is that data is sorted into columns that don't change places.There is additional improvement on the original that does not return errors if nothing was found but more on that later.

If any questions or comments please feel free to contact me.

Labels: Excel, Programing

Ever since I first used WinAmp plugin to turn off/on my keyboard lights I wanted to reproduce that effect. finally some time ago I found out how its done and here's how.

The image on the left is from KeyLED 0.9.3 plugin for Samurize that I made.

My programing language of choice is Delphi from Borland since its first birth as Pascal for Windows and later as Delphi 1. Never needed to change so code will be for delphi but it is such a small part of code that it could be translated to any programing language with relative ease.

The trick with controlling your keyboard lights is a very old one. Computer communicates with keyboard on I/O ports 60h which is data port, and with port 64h which is Command/Status port of keyboard. By writing to port 60h we bypass the system and change the LED indicator for eg. Caps Lock to off even if Caps Lock is on but without changing the Caps Lock status. Caps Lock stays on even if LED is off. This enables us to play with keyboard lights without any worries.

Port 64h is used to detect if keyboard is ready. We do that by waiting that status of port 64h becomes 0. Then we prepare keyboard to change keyboard light by writing EDh to port 60h and then wait port 64h to once again become 0.

The waiting for 64h port to become 0 is a safety measure that can be bypassed but I would recommend against it. You would still be able to change the LED state but by waiting for ready state you remove some unwanted artifacts like missing keystrokes etc.

After we prepare the keyboard we can turn off and on Keyboard lights. By writing to port 60h combinations of

1. Caps Lock = 4 or second bit = 1 (00000100)
   
2. Num Lock = 2 or first bit = 1 (00000010)
   
3. Scroll Lock = 1 or zero bit = 1 (00000001)
   

we can selectively turn on and off lights on the keyboard without changing caps lock or numlock status.

This is all just theory but how it is applied in reality? Well, Windows XP introduced restrictive methods for accessing hardware ports so we need a library that can to that for us. In the good old Dos there was Int 9 and direct access to ports but not anymore. Library that I use is Inpout32.dll. It is open source so if you really like it you could incorporate it directly into your applications removing the need for "one additional file to carry around".

First we need to create functions connecting to DLL by

function Out32(wAddr:word;bOut:byte):byte; stdcall; external 'inpout32.dll';
function Inp32(wAddr:word):byte; stdcall; external 'inpout32.dll';

With functions for port access defined we can now proceed with writing and waiting and writing and waiting by:

PROCEDURE Set_keyboard_lights(n,c,s : boolean);
var
bErr:byte;
val : byte;
BEGIN
val := 0;
IF s THEN inc(val);
IF n THEN inc(val,2);
IF c THEN inc(val,4);
repeat until (inp32($64) AND 2)=0;
bErr:=(Out32($60,$ED));
repeat until (inp32($64) AND 2)=0;
bErr:=(Out32($60,val));
END;

Procedure presented will take three parameters that can be either true of false; NumLock Status, CapsLock Status and NumLock Status.

This small snippet is all you need to control your Keyboard Lights. Have Fun!!

Labels: Design, Open Source, Programing

Cambrian House went all out and fed Google 1,000 pizzas.

Labels: Digg, Programing

Cambrian House

Cambrian House defines them self as crowdsourced. They started with a simple idea in 2005, and that idea was to allow

"brilliant ideas are submitted (by you) for the community (that's you too) to rate. If an idea gets a lot of support, Cambrian House will build it with the help of the worldwide development community (there you are again). Contributors take their pick of exciting projects, and in return, they get a piece of the royalty pie (...that's money)."

Cambrian House is a part of SourceForge.org and there are currently 3288 ideas submitted.

One of interesting moves in order to thank people that pay, Cambrian House decided to feed Google 1,000 pizzas.

Labels: Open Source, Programing